Most writers I know would rather submit to a journal that's rejected them three times than spend an afternoon building a website. That's fair. Self-promotion feels gross. But at some point someone asks for your site and you need to have one that isn't embarrassing.
Good news: the bar is low. A writer's website doesn't need to do much. It just needs to exist and not actively hurt you.
The minimum you need
Four things. That's it.
- A bio that explains who you are and what you write
- Some actual work, or links to where your work lives
- Where to buy your book, or read your poems, or follow your newsletter
- A way to contact you
If you have those four things on one page that loads fast and doesn't require someone to click through six menus, you're done. You've built a writer website. You can stop.
The reason people overcomplicate this is they look at author websites built by publishers in 2011, full of photo carousels and "Press" tabs and a blog that hasn't been updated since the book came out. Don't use those as your reference point.
What to skip
A lot, actually.
| Thing people add | Why to skip it |
|---|---|
| A blog | Only worth it if you'll actually post. Otherwise it just shows a date from 2022. |
| A "Press" page | Unless you have more than a handful of clips, just link them inline. |
| A newsletter signup separate from everything else | Put it in the contact section. Don't make it a whole thing. |
| An elaborate "About" story | Two paragraphs. Nobody reads the long version. |
| Social feed embeds | They break, they look bad, and they make your page slow. |
Skip the splash page. Skip the audio that plays automatically. Skip the black background with white text in a cursive font that makes everything hard to read. I know it feels literary. It's not.
The bio section
The bio is the hardest part because you're writing about yourself, which writers are famously bad at doing without either underselling or going weird.
Write it in third person if it's going on a website. Yes, even if you hate that. It reads cleaner, and it's easier to copy-paste when you submit to journals or events and they ask for a bio.
Keep it to two paragraphs. First paragraph: what you write, what you've published, where you've appeared. Second paragraph: one or two human details that make you sound like a person.
The human details are important. Not "she enjoys long walks" nonsense, but something real. Where you're from. What you do when you're not writing. What obsessions show up in your work. If your poems are all about industrial landscapes and you grew up next to a steel mill, that's worth one sentence.
If you write in multiple genres or under multiple names, pick one thing to lead with. You can mention the other stuff, but don't make people solve a puzzle about who you are.
Work and publications
This is the section people either make too complicated or forget to include entirely.
If you have a book, the cover image goes here with a buy link. If you have poems or essays published online, link a few of the best ones. If everything is in print journals, name them and move on.
Three to five samples is enough. You're not building an archive. You're showing someone who just landed on your site what kind of writer you are so they can decide in thirty seconds whether they want to read more.
For poets especially: link to one or two poems that are actually accessible to someone who didn't take your MFA workshop. Not because you should dumb anything down, but because that's who's finding your site from a search engine.
If you have a chapbook or a self-published collection, treat it like a book. Cover image. Buy link. Two sentences about what it is. Done.
Contact
Put your email address on the page. I know spam is annoying. Do it anyway. A contact form is fine, but a visible email address is better because it signals you're actually reachable, which matters for readings, collaborations, residency applications, and anyone who wants to ask you to write something for money.
If you're active on one or two platforms, link them here. Not every platform. The ones you actually check.
If you have a newsletter, this is where you mention it. One line. Link. That's it.
Writers sometimes skip the contact section because they're not sure they want to be contacted. Understandable. But if you're going to have a public website at all, make it possible to reach you. Otherwise the whole thing is a monument to itself.
If you want a starting point that doesn't require you to make any design decisions, misfitlinks.me has a writer and poet template that's already set up with exactly these sections. You swap in your own words and you're done. No portfolio carousel, no parallax effects, nothing you didn't ask for.